A conversational interview between Josh Trent and Zach Bush discussing severe soil degradation from industrial farming and chemical use (e.g., Roundup), the planetary carbon cycle, and the cascading risks to oceans, climate, and pandemics. Bush argues soils (≈2400 gigatons of carbon capacity) have been largely killed—leading to topsoil loss, increased atmospheric CO2/PM2.5, ocean acidification, and economic losses—while calling for systemic agricultural and market changes to restore soil breathing.
Chapters
All the ways that we treat the soil, the lungs of our planet. It's the same way that we're treating ourselves and our brothers and sisters. And I have to tell you, like, I was really angry today, like I was in touch with my sacred anger. Because our brothers and sisters are giving away their power, wearing their masks, sitting down, not speaking their truth. This type of information, this conversation needs to be shared across the planet and more because we get to pay attention to how the Earth is breathing. So share with us, how is the Earth actually breathing right now? Like, what is the current state of affairs with how our mother is breathing?
She's suffocating right now. So Mother Earth breathes through her soils and oceans. And the ocean can bring in about 90 gigatons of carbon a year. And the ocean produces 90 gigatons of carbon a year. So it's very balanced ecosystem that's developed over 4 billion years of a water based planet. And through her grace, the mother ocean can also absorb another 2 gigatons of carbon. If there's excess in the atmosphere, that may be to our own demise. Because if you kill enough of the soil and you can't absorb the carbon that the soil is supposed to breathe, which is huge, like 2400 gigatons compared to the 90 gigatons of the ocean. So with soils breathing in 2400 gigatons through our irritable soils. So anything that we think of farmable soils, that's where the humus is at. We also have humus in the high Siberian environment in northern Russia, China, up through Canada and Alaska and all that. That's the only semblance of breathing soils we have left on the planet. We have thoroughly killed it. There's a little spot in the middle of the Amazon that's still struggling to hang on right now as we continue to burn that jungle down. But we have just this rim of breath at the top of the planet in the tundra space because we were unable to farm there. But 97% of the land that's farmable has been depleted of its capacity to breathe. In Carbo, we see huge carbon deficits in the soil, which means that the plant life there is slow to grow. It needs all of these chemical inputs and everything else to fake it out because the soil is really dead and has turned into dirt rather than soil. Soil is an extraordinary living entity. Dirt is a pile of dust that doesn't have much life left in it. And we're in the largest dust bowl in history in the United States and other western Countries, Australia included. We're losing something like 2 tons of topsoil per acre. We have 125 million active acres of farmland in the United States. You add that up, the cost of a ton of soil, and you multiply that out across 125 million acres losing their topsoil at that rate. You realize we're losing 11% of our gross domestic product in soil every year now. And so 11% of $17 trillion, over a trillion dollars of natural resources being washed down the Mississippi river and other tributaries within our country because we so destroyed the soil architecture. I have been preaching against Roundup for years, and it was really devastating when I found out Roundups only hacked through the soil. Health Academy experts, Ph.D. in soil science there, Alan Williams, who's in our film and all that, quickly taught us that, yes, chemicals can completely annihilate. They function as potent antibiotics in the soil systems. You can kill 50% deep living earthworms with one application. You can kill 100% of the top living earthworms with one application of Roundup. So yes, you totally devastate that, that environment around. But then it's, you know, the next steps there after is plowing. And so when you over plow a field, you, you, you murder the mycelial, you know, bed beneath it, and you lose nutrient trafficking. And so farmers who start to get desperate to control weeds will just start over disking. If you're an organic farmer and you cannot spray Roundup and other potent herbicides and pesticides, organic farmers unfortunately still have quite a cadre of toxins. They can spray, but they tend to over plow again. Somebody who's over plowing their field will have worse soil architecture who's somebody who's not plowing but is just using Roundup. So that was devastating. It meant we needed to change not just 50 years of toxin spraying. We needed to change 1100 years of farm practice. Because we started using the plow in 900 A.D. and if you read a Western Civ textbook, it literally says in the first paragraph, western civilization began with the invention of the plow. Holy crap. Western civilization started the moment we increased our capacity to kill Mother Earth. And I think we have done it steadily over the next 1100 years with every other invention we've come up with to more, further distance ourselves and more severely destroy the ecosystem we live within. So farmers footprint was born. We realized we didn't need just an educational film. We needed a nonprofit to get large enough to actually change the economics and the infrastructure around farmers so they could make that transition because you can't tell a farmer in the middle of Minnesota you need to grow organic. Well, they have no place to sell that. There's no silo within 1,000 miles of them that's going to be able to both take in their, their regenerative organic thing and get that out to the marketplace at the higher value point. So you're asking them to do a very labor intensive effort to change behavior with no reward on the other side. So once we solve that, we're like, oh my gosh, we need to start to build public awareness, build big financial investment fund like strategies, government awareness, government programs, all of the strategies need to be taken to hand to literally change the $1.7 trillion US agriculture, the $3 trillion global economy around food needs to be changed almost overnight. If we don't change in the next eight years, that collapse of 97% of our soils that were breathing previously are going to choke our oceans. And so when you lose 2,400 gigatons of breath work of the topsoil, you get CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere, methane, other greenhouse gases, importantly PM 2.5 too. And so every pandemic we ever see that can tag it SIF on the backside of corona or any other virus is going to get worse every time because the concentration of carbon particulate in the air is going to keep going up if we don't change our soil behavior. But it's more scary than that for me, which I'm trying to fear is the wrong thing. More alarming to me, more of a call to action to me, is the realization that PM2.5 is the least of our issues. When you realize that the oceans as they continue to take in more and more carbon dioxide and methane and everything else every year, because there's a need for it, and they will continue to give that grace and suck it in, they start to acidify. Of the five great extinctions that have happened in the past in a fossil record, they wipe out somewhere between 85% and 97% of life on Earth. 85% rate extinction events happen around death of the topsoil, and that's usually due to massive volcanic activity or asteroids hitting the planet. The last one, 55 million years ago, looks to have been an asteroid that covered the planet in dust, choked out the topsoil. We lost 87%, but the time sequence for the death of soil was short enough that we didn't acidify the oceans and lose ocean life. The ones that have wiped out 97% were sustained death at the top. Soil such that the oceans fully acidified, and then we lost 97% of life on Earth. There's a hidden blessing there that I think is really fascinating.
